D8 Skills #24 & D9 | Recording Acoustic Guitar

Today, we recorded an acoutic guitar.

We used a Neumann U-87 large-diaphragm condenser microphone, along with a pair of AKG C 451B small-diaphragm condenser microphones.

We positioned the U-87 on-axis with the length of the guitar, and the C 451Bs using the ORTF technique pointing towards the front. With the U-87, I put on a pair of headphones, held my arm over them so that I minimised sound getting into them from the outside, and moved it around while the guitarist was playing in order to find the optimum position.

After listening in the control room, the C 451Bs sounded too bass heavy so I went and moved them back while listening (using the same technique as above). The reason they were sounding too bass heavy was because of proximity effect. Moving them backwards counteracted this.

I found that the best position was a little further to the right than what is shown in the above picture.

The guitarist wanted to play to a click track, and get 3 recordings of the same loop. To get the right tempo, I asked the guitartist to play for us and tapped in the tempo using the 'T' key.

I made sure loop record was enabled, and that 'Automatically Create New Playlists When Loop Recording' was checked. I then set the loop length to the correct amount of bars and we were off.